About Tobias Becker

Tobias Becker is a research fellow at the German Historical Institute London, where he is currently working on a history of the nostalgia wave in the nineteen seventies and eighties. He is interested in the social and cultural history of Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth century and especially in the history of popular culture, urban history and public history. He has published Inszenierte Moderne. Populäres Theater in Berlin und London, 1880-1930 (2014) and co-edited Popular Musical Theatre in London and Berlin, 1890-1939 (2014) and Die Stadt der tausend Freuden. Vergnügungskultur um 1900 (2011).

Pop nostalgia, we are told, is everywhere. Our current golden age of television—from Mad Men to Vinyl, Downton Abbey to Call the Midwife—lovingly recreates earlier periods of the twentieth century, while club nights devoted to the 1980s or 1990s allow us to return to our youth. What is more, popular culture is, in the words of music journalist Simon Reynolds, addicted to its own past. It not only reminisces, it revives, reissues, remixes earlier forms and styles instead of coming up with genuinely new. Finally, our most modern technologies are always also time machines: producing sepia-coloured images of the present for an anticipated nostalgic recollection in the future.